


A Badge of Honour

by respoftw



Series: 2018 Hurt/Comfort Bingo [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Branding, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 11:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15071873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/respoftw/pseuds/respoftw
Summary: There was no honour in this.Rodney reaches breaking point.





	A Badge of Honour

**Author's Note:**

> Set in a hand wavey au where Rodney didn't blow up 4/5ths of a solar system. But, y'know, give him time.
> 
> Kronette picked square number 13 for my next fill which was the wild card square so Nicole_Swift asked for branding....sorry!

The people of Pegasus wore it like a badge of honour.  To see someone with it meant that they had done the unthinkable, the impossible, and survived being culled by the Wraith.  In a horribly inappropriate sort of way, it became a symbol of hope. A beacon to all who saw it that the Wraith were not absolute, that not all who were culled were lost.

_ Fuck that. _

Seeing the black, cracked skin that used to be John’s unblemished neck, Rodney wanted to find every person in the galaxy who thought of this mark as an honour and personally hold a searing stick of metal to their skin to see how they liked it.

The Wraith had never branded their captures - their stock - until after the Atlantis expedition arrived.  Rodney wondered sometimes which one of his fallen expedition members they had gotten the idea from. The analogy of humans being like cattle to the Wraith was so prevalent that it could have been any of them. It could have been him.  He’d been put on his knees by Wraith often enough over the years in Pegasus that they could easily have taken the idea directly from his own twisted mind and thought, yes, this would serve us well.

It wasn’t really important where the idea came from, Rodney supposed.  The fact remained that the Wraith now routinely branded those that they culled for storage in their sticky, webbed, coffin-like enclosures.  The brand was unique to each Hive and probably even made sense from a purely cold and clinical point of view. What better way to prove that you had claimed this stock first than to point to your own blistering mark in their skin?

Rodney wanted to kill them all.

The culling beam that had taken John had been aiming for Rodney.

Rodney had felt the force of a body knocking him out of the beam's path and turned, watched in horror as John disappeared in the white light.

It was so fucking typical of him to play the hero like that and the anger over his actions was all that kept Rodney from falling apart in the six hours it took to regroup, locate the Hive ship, infiltrate it and find John.

Six hours.

Maybe he was stupid for thinking that six hours was enough time for John to be unharmed.  Unblemished. Unbranded. 

John had been mostly on his own two feet when he limped into view, leaning on Lorne’s shoulder.  Rodney had been busy laying down cover fire but not too busy to crane his neck and follow their path, making sure that Lorne got John safely into the jumper, and that was when he had seen it.

He lost a little bit of time after that but when he came back to awareness, the marines were patting him on the shoulder, praising him for a job well done and John was unconscious, on his front, the open wound that was the oozing brand on his neck bare for the entire jumper to see.  It was large, spanning the length of John’s neck, starting at the base of his spine and ending just below his hairline. The mark had tendrils that snaked out from its middle, wrapping partially around John’s neck and inflaming the skin on the side. They would have had to roll the flat metal brand to achieve that and Rodney closed his eyes at just the thought of how much it would have hurt.

He threw up in the corner of the jumper, Evan passing him a bottle of water to clean his mouth out.  The Marines left him alone after that.

Six to twelve months for a brand like that to heal.

Rodney had seen enough of them by now to know the deal.  John would carry that mark for the rest of his life and, unless he wore turtleneck sweaters or grew his hair long it would always be the first thing people saw when they met him.

His badge of honour.

There was no honour in this.  The Wraith wouldn’t get away with doing this.  Not to someone Rodney lov- - not to _John_.

Once John was settled in the infirmary, Rodney had started to plan.  Carson had given John something that would keep him knocked out for days, in an effort to spare him the worst of the pain. It would give Rodney the time he needed to enact his plan.

_ Doranda. _

Elizabeth and John had said it was too dangerous, they had refused to let Rodney go back and try again, try to make it work.  

Well, they didn’t get a say anymore.  John wouldn’t get a say on Rodney’s safety ever again, not if this was the result.

With one last look at John’s sleeping form, one last look at the mess of John’s neck, Rodney thought about the filled jumper waiting for him, thought about his likelihood of succeeding, the chance that he would stop this happening again versus the chance that he would never see John again.

“So long, John,” he whispered before disappearing into the dark of Atlantis.

He _would_ fix this, he _would_ make sure the Wraith never hurt anyone again.  Or he would die trying.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This whole people picking a square to tell me which order to fill things in is working so please continue to do that and I'll compile my list. Numbers between 1 and 25 please! :)


End file.
